This is one in a series of posts about my recent interest in the “Enneagram of Personality,” and how Type Four is a perfect fit for me, and also offers me insight and potential growth. For more information about this series, see the first post here.

“Fours have the gifts and the grace to hold both beauty and pain without the need to choose one over the other.” (Suzanne Stabile, The Path Between Us, 126)

In my first year as a pastor, I attended a mandatory retreat held annually for newly ordained pastors. It was called “First Call Theological Education,” and was designed to give us support, especially since most of us were “on our own” as solo pastors in smaller congregations. These retreats were intended to help us learn how to navigate the challenges of being a pastor. (If you’ve read my book Darkwater, this retreat may sound familiar to you. The retreat I narrated in Chapter 23 was also a First Call Theological Education retreat, just a few years earlier. I had a very different experience at that one!)

Anyway…I have a vivid memory of a conversation I had in one of the workshops at the First Call retreat. An experienced pastor was leading the workshop, and she told us something like this: “As a pastor, there will be some really good times. Make sure to hold onto those good times and remember them. Because there will also be times when it’s really hard, when things are going really badly. Make sure during those bad times to remember the good times. That will make it easier.”

I raised my hand and asked, “Should we also remember the bad times when the good times are happening?”

The leader looked at me with a quizzical expression. “Why would you do that?” she asked. I think she was completely dumfounded. But to me, that was a reasonable question. I felt like maybe it would be helpful to always keep a sense of the fullness of the experience, both good and bad. It felt balanced to me.

I have often wondered why I asked that question. I’ve usually attributed it to depression, of course, like I do so many things. But now I wonder if it was part of being a Four. Stabile wrote that “Fours [can] hold both beauty and pain without the need to choose one.” Is that what I was trying to do? Live in both at the same time? Perhaps.

Whether that’s what I was doing that day or not, I certainly have done that. Pain can be beautiful. It’s from emotional pain that I’ve discovered and created a lot of the beauty in my life. I never thought this was weird – I just thought it meant I was an artist. Maybe it just means I’m a Four.

Image by 8926 from Pixabay